'In lowly dale, fast by a river's side, With woody hill o'er hill encompassed round, Than whom a fiend more fell is nowhere found. It was, I ween, a lovely spot of ground; And there a season atween June and May Half prankt with Spring, with Summer half embrowned, No living wight could work, ne carèd even for play.' There are verbal inspirations in a great poet which satisfy the ear, capture the imagination, and live in the memory for ever. Milton's pages are studded with them like stars; Gray has a few, Wordsworth many, and Keats some not to be surpassed for witchery. Of such poetically suggestive lines Thomson has his share, and although it seems unfair to remove them from their context, the excision may be made in a few cases, since they show not only that a new poet had appeared in an age of prose, but a poet of a new order, whose inspiration was felt by his successors. How poetically imaginative is Thomson's imagery of the 'meekeyed morn, mother of dews;' of of 'Ships dim discovered dropping from the clouds;' 'Autumn nodding o'er the yellow plain ;' of the summer wind 'Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;' and of the Hebrid-Isles 'Placed far amid the melancholy main,' a line which may have suggested the lovelier verse of Wordsworth descriptive of the cuckoo: 'Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides." Thomson did not live long after the publication of The Castle of Indolence. A cold caught upon the river led to a fever, which ended fatally on August 27th, 1748. He had for some years been in love with a Miss Young, the 'Amanda' of his very feeble love lyrics, and her marriage is said to have hastened his death. Men, however, do not die for love at the mature age of forty-nine, and as Thomson was 'more fat than bard beseems,' and was not always temperate in his habits, constitutional causes are more likely to have led to the poet's death than Amanda's cruelty. Dr. Johnson says somewhere that the further authors keep apart from each other the better, and the literary squabbles of the last century afforded him good ground for the remark. It is to Thomson's credit that, like Goldsmith twenty-six years later, he died, leaving behind him many friends and not a single enemy. His fame rests upon two poems, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and on a song which has gained a national reputation. Apart from Rule Britannia, which appeared originally in the Masque of Alfred and is spirited rather than poetical, his attempts to write lyrical poetry resulted in failure; but from his own niche in the Temple of Fame time is not likely to dislodge Thomson. CHAPTER IIL. MINOR POETS. Sir Samuel Garth-Ambrose Philips-John Philips-Nicholas Rowe-Aaron Hill-Thomas Parnell-Thomas Tickell-William Somerville-John Dyer-William Shenstone-Mark AkensideDavid Mallet-Scottish Song-Writers. Sir Samuel Garth (1660-1717-18). IN Pope's day even the medical profession was influenced by party feeling, and Samuel Garth became known as the most famous Whig physician, but his friendships were not confined to one side, and he appears to have been universally beloved. Garth came of a Yorkshire family, and was born in 1660. He was admitted a Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1693, gained a large practice, and is said to have been very benevolent to the poor. The Dispensary (1699) is a satire called forth by the opposition of the Society of Apothecaries, to an edict of the College, and is a mock-heroic poem, which the quarrel made so effective at the time that it passed through several editions. The merit of achieving what the satirist intended may therefore be granted to the Dispensary. Few modern readers, however, will appreciate the welcome it received, and it is ludicrous to read in Anderson's edition of the poet that the poem is only inferior in humour, discrimination of character, and poetical ardour to the Rape of the Lock.' It would be far more accurate to say that the Dispensary has not a single merit in common with that poem, and but slight merit of any kind. The following passage upon death is the most vigorous, and is interesting as having supplied Cowper with a line in the poem on his Mother's Picture: 1 'Tis to the vulgar Death too harsh appears, To die is landing on some silent shore Where billows never break, nor tempests roar ; The wise through thought th' insults of death defy, 'Tis what the guilty fear, the pious crave; Sought by the wretch and vanquished by the brave. And though a tyrant, offers liberty.' Addison in defending Garth in the Whig-Examiner from the criticisms of Prior in the Examiner, the organ of the Tory party, says he does not question but the author' who has endeavoured to prove that he who wrote the Dispensary was no poet, will very suddenly undertake to show that he who gained the battle of Blenheim is no general.' The comparison was an unfortunate one. Marlborough's military reputation has grown brighter with time, Garth's fame as a poet has long ago ceased to exist. 66 A literary although not a poetical interest is associated with the name of well-natured Garth," who, as Pope acknowledges, was one of his earliest friends; like Arbuthnot, he lived among the wits, and as a member of the famous Kit-cat Club he wrote verses upon the Whig beauties toasted by its members. His name is linked with Dryden's as well as with that of his illustrious successor. It will be remembered how, on the death of Dryden, the poet's body lay in state in the College of PhyCowper's line, 'Where tempests never beat nor billows roar,' is not an improvement upon Garth's. Tempests, it has been justly said, do not beat. H sicians, and how, before the great procession started for Westminster Abbey, Sir Samuel, who was then President, delivered a Latin oration. Garth died in January, 1717-18, and, according to Pope, was a good Christian without knowing it. Addison, however, who visited Garth in his last illness, told Dr. Berkeley that he rejected Christianity on the assurance of his friend Halley that its doctrines were incomprehensible, and the religion itself an imposture. According to another report which comes through Pope, he actually died a papist.' Ambrose Philips, who belonged, like Tickell, to Addison's 'little senate,' was born in 1671, and Ambrose Philips educated at St. John's, Cambridge. His (1671-1749). Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany (1709), and the same volume contained the Pastorals of Pope. Log-rolling was understood in those days, and Philips's verses received warm praise in more than one number of the Guardian, the writer in one place declaring that there have been only four masters of the art in above two thousand years: Theocritus, who left his dominions to Virgil; Virgil, who left his to his son Spenser; and Spenser, who was succeeded by his eldest born, Philips.' Pope's Pastorals were not mentioned, and in revenge he devised the consummate artifice of sending an anonymous paper to the Guardian, in which, while appearing to praise Philips, he exalted himself. Steele took the bait, and considering that the essay depreciated Pope would not publish it without his permission, which was of course readily granted. From that time,' says Johnson, 'Pope and Philips lived in a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.' Philips's tragedy, The Distrest Mother (1712), a translation, or nearly so, of Racine's Andromaque, was puffed in the Spectator. It is the play to which Sir Roger de Coverley was taken by his friends, and the representa |